Oliver Winchester Research Paper

According to Lee A. Silva's document, "John Browning's 1887 Lever Action Shotgun was Another Winner for Winchester and a Hit with Wells Fargo Guards," many of John Browning's designs and ideas went into Oliver Winchester's firearms (Silva). Winchester also had many other occupations other than gunsmithing. The three most important parts of Winchester are the life of Oliver Winchester, the creations of Oliver Winchester, and the guns that won the West.

Oliver Fisher Winchester (November 30, 1810 - December 11, 1880) was both a businessman and a politician. He is most famous for his manufacturing and marketing of the Winchester repeating rifle, which is the descendant of the Volcanic rifle made years earlier ("Biography of Oliver Winchester").
Active in politics, Winchester served as the Commissioner of New Haven City and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1866-1867. When Winchester died in 1880, he willed the ownership of the Company to his only son, William Winchester, who later died in March of the next year of tuberculosis. The ownership then went to William's wife, Sarah, who believed that the family was cursed by the many spirits that have been killed by the Winchester rifles. She later moved to California where she began to build a chaotic mansion ("Biography of Oliver Winchester"). All of the rooms consisted of the number thirteen. There were thirteen steps to every room, thirteen windows, and the rooms were 13' by
The Model 1887, not as popular with the hunters, gave the bad guys of the west an advantage. The 1887 had a magazine capacity of six shots, four more than the overly popular double barrel. The "six shooter" was available in a 10-gauge and 12-gauge black powder shotgun. Production ran for fourteen years and just under 65,000 shotguns were produced. This guns standard barrel lengths came in thirty inches, thirty-two inches, and a special "riot gun" was offered in a twenty inch barrel (Silva).

Winchester's lever-action was extremely popular with the majority of the good and bad guys of the West. The 1887 was used by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to be used to protect its messengers. Of all the guns of the Old West, the Model 1887 with the serial number 36549, was the most famous. It was a 10-guage with a saw-off or cut-down barrel. It was used by Wells Fargo guard Jeff Milton in February of 1900 to kill the infamous "Three-Fingered Jack", leader of the five-member Stiles-Alvord gang